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Up Close and Personal

First, a big congratulations to all those who were admitted to Tuck's class of 2015 last Friday in the January round! We're excited to welcome you to campus for ASW and then for the real deal in August--you all are closer to Fall A than we are, which is just another reminder of how quickly the business school experience passes!

With Spring Break almost at an end, I've just returned from Japan where, with 17 other Tuckies, Professor Paul Argenti, Professor Hidemi Kitamura (of the Kwansei Gakuin University), and Stephen Pidgeon (a member of Tuck's Career Development Office), we spent a week and a half meeting with Japanese firms and exploring Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. For anyone interested in gaining exposure to international business, the learning expeditions are a great experience: we met with senior executives from firms in a variety of industries, including Osaka Gas, Nissan, Mitsui (where Ikujiro Nonaka, a leading expert on leadership and a member of Mitsui's board of directors, spent a few hours with us), and Mizuno (where we met with the CEO, Akito Mizuno). We had the opportunity to ask the speakers questions, and it was really great to hear their candid answers to our questions on business strategy. One firm (Daikin) gave us a tour of one of their air conditioning manufacturing factories, and it was pretty amazing. The trip provided a great opportunity to get to know my classmates, and a bonus was that we overlapped with the annual "Japan Trek", where a bunch of classmates (I think around 50 went this year) go to Japan for the break.

One of the highlights of the trip was when Prof. Argenti invited us to a whisky/cigar bar--besides the historic ambiance of the bar, it was great to hang out with one of Tuck's distinguished professors. He's really down-to-earth and I enjoyed the wide-ranging conversation. It's interactions like this that make the learning expeditions a truly special experience!